planetf1.com

We were in the second episode of series one Robot wars.

Well I say we were in it, we would have been had our robot worked after the first round out in the car park. It did not

I liked Robot Wars, though I felt it lacked something when it went to being just about the Robot wars and not about the whole overall performance as it was in the very earliest series. They used to have obstacle courses etc which I always found amusing (though I was in primary school at the time).

My friend and I once tried to build a robot to enter. It was a remote control car with an ice cream tub on top of it. Ah, to be so damned young. We had an unpowered hammer hinged onto the top also. You could make it flip by ramming into something. I reiterate, I was probably 11 or so at the time, and we made this with no input from anyone else.


Best robot was Chaos 2.
Best house robot was obviously Shunt. I didn't care for the other house robots as I thought they were too silly gimmicky (when I was a kid!).

I think Tufty set up a similar thread a while ago, might be worth contacting him to see if he still has the amateur robots he put together. Ice Cream Bot might show him a thing or two?

moby wrote:We were in the second episode of series one Robot wars.

Well I say we were in it, we would have been had our robot worked after the first round out in the car park. It did not

Alienturnedhuman


It was a real duff thing built in the bottom of an oil drum and spun to hit.

Our blade was considered too dangerous, so our best weapon was replaced with a steel rod, which was useless, and our battery was disallowed, and the type we had to replace it with was bigger so we had to cut a clearance out of a support bracket, which broke when our 'bot was flipped.

We never got as far as v the house robots, or even on stage. Just the car park weeding out.

We got through to the second round ( not episode as I put above ) but the broken bracket and resulting damage to the shaft meant we had to pack up. Still had a brilliant time though


Always intended to go back, but by the time we could it was way too serious to bother unless you had the kit.

mac_d wrote:I liked Robot Wars, though I felt it lacked something when it went to being just about the Robot wars and not about the whole overall performance as it was in the very earliest series. They used to have obstacle courses etc which I always found amusing (though I was in primary school at the time).

My friend and I once tried to build a robot to enter. It was a remote control car with an ice cream tub on top of it. Ah, to be so damned young. We had an unpowered hammer hinged onto the top also. You could make it flip by ramming into something. I reiterate, I was probably 11 or so at the time, and we made this with no input from anyone else.


Best robot was Chaos 2.
Best house robot was obviously Shunt. I didn't care for the other house robots as I thought they were too silly gimmicky (when I was a kid!).

Statistically the best robot was Razer, it had 41 wins to 6 losses (although they voluntarily gave up one win where they felt the judges incorrectly awarded them the win, so I guess it's 40 -7), and two of those losses were it breaking down.

However Chaos 2 was the only one to win the series more than once, but it was outclassed as the flippers in the later series were much more powerful - and it even got flipped out of the arena in its final wars. However, I think they always came across as some of the nicer competitors without any egos.

I would say the three most dominating robots from the series were Razer, Chaos 2 and Tornado - and hilariously, if you YouTube some of the Razer/Tornado fights the comments sections are still full of people arguing as if the fights happened yesterday as opposed to in 2002.

Shunt was the best house robot until Matilda got upgraded to have a flywheel instead of the useless chainsaw. That was so powerful it could knock a 100kg robot up out of the arena, which she did on multiple occasions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGK9uAr0Xas&t=7m42s

However, all of those robots would get turned into shrapnel fairly quickly if they entered today, there are a couple of spinners - one called Tombstone and another called IceWave which have huge spinning bars full of energy. The creator of Tombstone runs a near identical robot called Last Rites in the non televised robot combat scene in the US (so it's fine to post links to YouTube stuff of that) and when you see that in action you'll see the difference in terms of the damage being dealt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8DKPiAHn40

Loads of Robot Wars fans say "Oh, Hypnodisc would beat that" - but what they don't realise is that Hypnodisc was tearing apart high school projects, and family fun projects which were far closer to your R/C car with ice cream tub. When Hypnodisc went up against the top robots it was barely able to do more than put dents and scratches in them (and if your do the kinetic energy calculations there is an order of magnitude in difference) The new robots do the damage Hypnodisc dealt out to lightly armoured robots to robots stronger than anything that appeared on Robot Wars.

P-F1 Mod wrote:I think Tufty set up a similar thread a while ago, might be worth contacting him to see if he still has the amateur robots he put together. Ice Cream Bot might show him a thing or two?

Hopefully he'll notice the thread and drop by, but I'll PM him if he doesn't.

moby wrote:Our blade was considered too dangerous,

In a special episode in Season 3, they invited international robots to fight. A spinner robot from the US called the Mauler turned up, but it was deemed too dangerous to compete. It's hard to believe, but apparently in the early series they didn't have a screen between the combat area and the audience! The modern arenas have to have bullet proof lexan all around (including the ceiling) and even that gets damaged by the speed of some of the bits that get torn off.

Alienturnedhuman wrote:

moby wrote:Our blade was considered too dangerous,

In a special episode in Season 3, they invited international robots to fight. A spinner robot from the US called the Mauler turned up, but it was deemed too dangerous to compete. It's hard to believe, but apparently in the early series they didn't have a screen between the combat area and the audience! The modern arenas have to have bullet proof lexan all around (including the ceiling) and even that gets damaged by the speed of some of the bits that get torn off.

As I said, we were not even in an arena. There was a section of the car park with barriers and that is where things happened. There was a sort to assault course come point-to-point which had scoring sections, then a painted box in which the combat took place.

There were some guys with poles and extinguishers, and one with a sledge hammer (yip ).

Even TV coverage was 2 mobile cameras and the guy with a hamster on a stick.


It was all arranged by the production company, not the TV company, and was probably a sort of test bed for later shows.
I had never even heard of the people who turned up to cover it, but apparently one was from Tomorrows world.
"Fred" from HOW was there, but I dont know if he was doing it officially or just watching.

This was the selection very first series, so it probably moved on a long way quite quickly.

I did used to like robot wars. After the first season with Clarkson being a fairly bad presenter on it due to his unsympathetic harshness towards the younger contestants, and also the crapness of a lot of the 'robots' (a lot of which were basically 1/10 scale remote control cars with a bit of metal cladding), it found it's feet with Craig Charles presenting it, the robots getting better year on year and the comedy of a load of nerds (no offense to anyone here, but lets be fair - the best robots were generally built by very stereotypical nerds) being interviews by Philipa Forester in the pits and trying so hard to look at her face and not turn red!

It was a great show and I do miss it. I loved the international competitions too and it's a shame most of them, if not all, got cancelled at about the same time. I will have to have a look and see if I can find the ABC show anywhere cause it would be good to watch something like it again.

I've been showing my girlfriend the original 7 UK Robot Wars series recently, so it's nice to see the sport still has a decent following!

In answer to the mod's comment, no none of my HIGHLY amateur efforts survive - myse;f and a few mates battled them routinely until both the chassis and the complete array of shells were dead. However, I hvave a bespoke RC modded car, as does my girfriend. I also have a second smaller one and a friend's one sat at home awaiting a little maintenance. I'm planning to set up a small tournament after the summer once I'm back in Wales, and anyone who wants to put something together is welcome to join us. PM me if you're interested, I'm happy to discuss rules [what little there are!] and logistics if anybody fancies giving it a go on the cheap.

As for the return of Battlebots, I've been recently thinking about finding Robotica episodes - for some reason YouTube doesn't seem to have the first series, which is a shame. For those who don't know, it's not so much a 'war' concept as a games show with a head to head fight at the end. Little me was all for the devastation of things like Splinter and Robogeddon so a more skilled, less violent show was less appealing, but it strikes more of a chord now. Will have to look up old Battlebots as well now, obviously!

Will definitely keep an eye on this thread, and I hope that there's some interest in joining a few slightly bonkers uni students and myself for a skirmish or two!

God I loves Robot wars as a kid. The Razor guys lived up the road from us, so I got to see it tested up close and personal. They were really nice guys, even let me have a spin with it! I also got up close and personal with Panic Attack II. I have a picture somewhere of me about 10-13 years old with the robot and the team. They were super nice people too!

I agree with Minchy that the Craig Charles/Philipa Forester years were the best. I enjoyed that the robots were not these super advanced things, but mostly home projects, and that the whole thing was just a bit of fun rather than a serious competition. What was the robot that was covered in the spotted fur that always got set on fire? That was great. And the Plunderbird team were hilarious.

I will have a look at the new Battlebots, but I have a feeling that all that charm has properly been replaced with a 'serious' competition and won't be half as fun to watch. I may be wrong though.

Aaaaah, I always wanted to control Sir Killalot!

Nice series indeed

Saz wrote:I will have a look at the new Battlebots, but I have a feeling that all that charm has properly been replaced with a 'serious' competition and won't be half as fun to watch. I may be wrong though.

Robot Wars was basically an entertainment show in comparison to Battlebots - it was all about the style and presentation, from the industrial look to the arena and the house robots. The producers also influenced heavily some of the outcomes - Google Storm 2 controversy to see just how bad it got in the final season - but the house robots would never attack the big name competitors as badly as they would the unheard of 'crappy' projects. ie, if someone like Hypnodisc or Razer got immobilised, the house robots would normally just push them in the pit. But if some wood framed, wedge with a spike on built by first time contestants got immobilised, the house robots would trash it for the remainder of the match.

Also, there were times in Robot Wars where the robot the producers didn't want to win would get an upper hand in the competition, so a house robot would come out and attack it to give the other robot a chance to get back on top in the fight. They'd then portray it as the house robot "misbehaving", which was obviously BS as they are just being controlled by human operators under the instruction of the producers!

Battlebots is much closer to a sport - but the presentation of the show outside of the fights is super American-reality TV meets American sports TV. So there is lots of staged trash talking between the competitors, and overselling the capabilities of their robots, and lots of uninformed conjecture by the pundits who don't seem to know what they are talking about (but are probably just saying scripted stuff to make 'good TV'). Once the battles get started, its a lot purer than Robot Wars was. But not as much fun, think F1 without DRS vs F1 with DRS and water sprinklers.

There are no house robots, the arena instead has hazards around it, some that are permanently activated (such as twisting screws at the side, and big hammers that pound down on a robot pushed into the corner) and others that are randomly activated by a computer (circular saws and spikes that pop up out of the floor) It's also a lot better illuminated than Robot Wars was.

The Razer boys are one of the competitors in the new Battlebots, but not with Razer as that's long since retired. They have a robot called Warhead which they built for the last season of old Battlebots, and upgraded when the new series got announced.

You can see a couple of their fights from old Battlebots here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVdrGvy3HIQ&t=2m43s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlOVmCvnE2g&t=3m45s

What I love about their robots is their sense of aesthetics and animation. They look like works of art.

I used to love Robot Wars as a kid, I actually went to watch it live once in one of the later series.

Alienturnedhuman wrote:

Saz wrote:I will have a look at the new Battlebots, but I have a feeling that all that charm has properly been replaced with a 'serious' competition and won't be half as fun to watch. I may be wrong though.

Robot Wars was basically an entertainment show in comparison to Battlebots - it was all about the style and presentation, from the industrial look to the arena and the house robots. The producers also influenced heavily some of the outcomes - Google Storm 2 controversy to see just how bad it got in the final season - but the house robots would never attack the big name competitors as badly as they would the unheard of 'crappy' projects. ie, if someone like Hypnodisc or Razer got immobilised, the house robots would normally just push them in the pit. But if some wood framed, wedge with a spike on built by first time contestants got immobilised, the house robots would trash it for the remainder of the match.

Also, there were times in Robot Wars where the robot the producers didn't want to win would get an upper hand in the competition, so a house robot would come out and attack it to give the other robot a chance to get back on top in the fight. They'd then portray it as the house robot "misbehaving", which was obviously BS as they are just being controlled by human operators under the instruction of the producers!

Battlebots is much closer to a sport - but the presentation of the show outside of the fights is super American-reality TV meets American sports TV. So there is lots of staged trash talking between the competitors, and overselling the capabilities of their robots, and lots of uninformed conjecture by the pundits who don't seem to know what they are talking about (but are probably just saying scripted stuff to make 'good TV'). Once the battles get started, its a lot purer than Robot Wars was. But not as much fun, think F1 without DRS vs F1 with DRS and water sprinklers.

There are no house robots, the arena instead has hazards around it, some that are permanently activated (such as twisting screws at the side, and big hammers that pound down on a robot pushed into the corner) and others that are randomly activated by a computer (circular saws and spikes that pop up out of the floor) It's also a lot better illuminated than Robot Wars was.

The Razer boys are one of the competitors in the new Battlebots, but not with Razer as that's long since retired. They have a robot called Warhead which they built for the last season of old Battlebots, and upgraded when the new series got announced.

You can see a couple of their fights from old Battlebots here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVdrGvy3HIQ&t=2m43s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlOVmCvnE2g&t=3m45s

What I love about their robots is their sense of aesthetics and animation. They look like works of art.

Those battles were actually quite cool, moreso than I expected. Warhead looks like a hypnodisc and razer had a lovechild. I might keep a passing eye on the new series, the robots do look pretty cool. I might actually enjoy it as an adult now, rather than the sillyness of robot wars that appealed as a child.

Like you said, there was a lot of rigging in the old robot wars, but I was a kid back then, so I imagine a lot of my fondness is nostalga. And I do like that there was a lot of competitors that didn't take it too seriously - you had nonsense like napalm, sir chromalot that were just these silly designs that didn't do very well, but were great fun. I used to get the stupid magazine with all the comics of the house robots etc, so I imagine it was very much aimed at a younger audience. It did get me into electronics, which is why I have my job now though, so it did some good!

Yup. Enjoying watching it again.

Back at school one of my teachers setup a "Battlebots" competition, two tables were put together and the idea was to have them push each other off the table. With that said the teacher was mainly expecting remote control cars that would bash into each other, lets just say he was surprised when one of the students turned up with a steak knife welded to the front chassis of his armored battlebot. The event didn't go too smoothly as most people had trouble with interfering radio channels and couldn't drive their cars so we could only pit cars against those that had different channels.

Now when my friend was testing out his steak-knifed armored beast he found out quickly that it was too heavy to get any proper grip on the slippery tables, so he took off the armored shell with the knife still welded to the chassis of the car. Now it was his turn and everyone was waiting in anticipation for this match-up to see the carnage this monster would deliver and better yet it was against the teacher himself and everyone gathered around the tables. The match started and just like every other match, trying to get a decent connection from all the other remotes made it slow to get started. Then the knife wielding now unarmored but significantly lighter death-bot came alive and raced out of control from one side of the table straight to the other side flying off the table in the air almost stabbing a girl in the chest as it flew past and then lodged itself into the wall behind her. Long story short, everyone left the room very quietly and maintenance never found out the cause of the massive hole underneath the whiteboard.

Loved watching it as a kid. I went to see a live show in Sheffield, which wasn't part of the TV series but a few familiar faces were there.

My favourites were Razor, Roadblock and Panic Attack. I know Roadblock quickly became technically obsolete but I liked the novelty of it.

Was never a massive fan of Chaos 2 for some reason. Hypnodisc destroyed a couple of Airfix kits in its first two fights but was generally less effective after that.

Others I remember

Nemesis - How can you not love a robot which catches fire
Gemini - Split in half to form two flipper bots. It never worked.
Thermador - A lobster with a flipper
Plunderbird - That team had some of the biggest characters in the pits
Wheely Big Cheese - Massive flipper, I remember one fight where it put an opponent into orbit.
Stinger - From my home town in Lincoln.
Pussycat - Didn't like them because they beat Razor a couple of times
Tornado - So much power
Big Brother - The kids were annoying.
Mortis - Really expensive but always crap

Caught up with the 2015 Battlebots - Some impressive machines there. I don't like the fact we only have 24 robots for a whole war though: UK had 128 at its largest, and if there's a market for a few machines, there's a market for a lot. More spaces also increases the appeal for new roboteers as more than 24 people then get to enter and we see more variety, more 'wild card' sorts of competitors etc.

Tufty wrote:Caught up with the 2015 Battlebots - Some impressive machines there. I don't like the fact we only have 24 robots for a whole war though: UK had 128 at its largest, and if there's a market for a few machines, there's a market for a lot. More spaces also increases the appeal for new roboteers as more than 24 people then get to enter and we see more variety, more 'wild card' sorts of competitors etc.

As I understand it, this first season is a trial run, so they contacted some established both builders and they only had a short period of time to build a machine or refit their existing machine to the new rules.

I think future seasons will have a lot more robots in it when they open it up to the public.

Alienturnedhuman wrote:

Tufty wrote:Caught up with the 2015 Battlebots - Some impressive machines there. I don't like the fact we only have 24 robots for a whole war though: UK had 128 at its largest, and if there's a market for a few machines, there's a market for a lot. More spaces also increases the appeal for new roboteers as more than 24 people then get to enter and we see more variety, more 'wild card' sorts of competitors etc.

As I understand it, this first season is a trial run, so they contacted some established both builders and they only had a short period of time to build a machine or refit their existing machine to the new rules.

I think future seasons will have a lot more robots in it when they open it up to the public.

Ah, makes sense. The other thing that bothered me actually was the flamethrowers - there was a reason at least the UK wars banned such weapons, and if the field DOES get opened up, amateurs handling gas bottles might not be the greatest idea. That said, they look far better in the BB arena than they ever did in the RW one. Definitely going to keep watching though.

Alienturnedhuman wrote:There was a preview for the next episode, when Stinger fights Bronco, and Stinger's flamethrower looks incredible in it. It think it could be the fight of the tournament.

Now the safety in the arena is much more rigorous, flamethrowers aren't the hazard they once were. The biggest danger is from the spinners smashing the glass with shrapnel. In the final season of old Battlebots, Nightmare lost a 1kg tooth in a battle which smashed through the ceiling and landed in the crowd, fortunately not hitting anyone.

Also, flamethrowers are more of a distraction weapon to intimidate your opponent rather than do any damage. Even back in the days of early Robot Wars when the robot build quality was very basic Sergeant Bash did little more than set the fur of Nemesis / Diotor on fire.

Any pics? I can't find anything

SchumieRules wrote:Any pics? I can't find anything

It was part of an interview panel they did promoting the show (so this is a legal upload)

I won't embed, as it's a long video, and I don't think the embed supports jumping to a specific point, so instead here's a link that goes straight to the fight (22:45 in for people who it doesn't work for)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsgp0PWbpoo&t=22m45s

The video doesn't spoil the result of the match. But the internet has already turned part of it into this gif:

Wow, thank you mate

Impressive...

Watched a few episodes of the latest series of battlebots on youtube. The fights were really impressive, but my god the nonsense inbetween the fights. I found an abridged episode that was just all the fights, and it was about 7mins out of a 40min episode. I swear robot wars was never that bad (or maybe I just has more paitence as a kid, not sure.) Maybe it's also because I'm British and not American but a lot of that stuff was so painful to watch I found myself skipping the video's to just the fighting parts.

The commentating is very WWE, which did make me chuckle. Very cheesey. There are some awesome robot designs though, and the fights were very very entertaining. I will probably keep my eye out for it, or just look for video's of the fights. I hope it continues though, and that they get even more awesome robots for the next year round.

That sort of thing would hopefully die down anyway, once ABC are sure this is going to be popular. They're just spreading the net as wide as possible in terms of demographics and interests. With any luck it will gradually morph into something more technical and less contrived, but I'm not holding my breath - after all, Robot Wars went the other way!

I hear that neither Maldonado nor Perez has a race seat next year. They're both looking at battlebots for 2016 as the closest thing to the way they drive.


.

Chunky wrote:I hear that neither Maldonado nor Perez has a race seat next year. They're both looking at battlebots for 2016 as the closest thing to the way they drive.


.

Low blow. Maldonado has been responsible for almost nothing that happened this year. No need to come into a non-F1 thread and bash

Keep the thread on topic please, let's not turn it into a F1 bash thread.

Did anyone ever watch Robot Combat League? It was a truly terrible robot battling show from the US that somehow made its way over to the UK on the SyFy channel, probably the most hilariously atrocious programme I have ever seen on TV. Entirely staged results, fake damage, fake sparks, a standard robot design, ridiculous trash talk and cringeworthy sob stories. It was worth watching just for the comedy value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7bSN30RRCI

I watched about 20 seconds of that. I want those 20 seconds back. That was just terrible...

Finally managed to find decent internet today to see them. AMAZING fights. I was sad to see one [I won't name names in case people haven't yet seen it] go SO closely one way then swing back almost arbitrarily, but that's the way it goes sometimes. A great pair of semis to come though, and a spectacular tournament. I stand by my earlier comments though: a UK-style heat system would be far more suitable, I think. Here's hoping for 2016!

It seems like a very interesting show, but I never have time to watch. However, I would definitely love to.

Tufty wrote:I was sad to see one [I won't name names in case people haven't yet seen it] go SO closely one way then swing back almost arbitrarily, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

I assume you are talking about:

Alienturnedhuman wrote:

Tufty wrote:I was sad to see one [I won't name names in case people haven't yet seen it] go SO closely one way then swing back almost arbitrarily, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

I assume you are talking about:

Spoiler (click to show)

Witch Doctor vs Tombstone? That was really gutting, Witch Doctor owned that fight and it was really funny to see the reactions of the people who had spoken so condescendingly about the robot and the people who assume Tombstone has some automatic right to walk to tournament.

Tombstone's previous two competitors had flat sides which were perfect for its blade. Had you switched Warhead and Tombstone's opponents around Warhead would have beaten Counter Revolution and Radioactive just as easily, and I think that Bite Force would have stood up to Tombstone - and possibly beaten it after seeing how effective Witch Doctor's wedge held up. Stinger has beaten Tombstone (in their non Battlebots branded versions) on multiple occassions.

So really, as always, it's luck of the draw. I'm just gutted that Team Hurtz's new hammer bot Beta was not able to take part. I think it would have won the tournament.

Yes!